Wage Gap News That Will Seriously Piss Off Sheryl Sandberg

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Well, here's a discouraging development on the wage gap front: According to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, which just released its yearly report on the median earnings for women and men, we are still earning less than guys are in nearly all of the 114 most common occupations.

Seriously? This is not okay.

In addition to this alarming finding, the report shows two other key trends happening in the workforce right now when it comes to the wage gap: The first is that women are more than twice as likely as men to work in occupations with poverty wages. In fact, the median incomes for four out of ten of most common career paths for women—housekeeping, waitressing, nursing, and cashiering—are just not enough to help get a family of four above the poverty line.

But, when it comes to high-earning jobs, women also get screwed. Compared to men, women have the worst earnings in sales occupations, like insurance and retail. Actually, insurance sales is where the biggest pay gap lies, with women in that field earing 64.3 percent of men's median weekly income.

"Year after year, it is occupations with high commission payments that do worst for women," said Ariane Hegewisch, the institute's study director. She says that it's not a matter of women being under qualified or not working as hard as men do in this field, but more that women are "less likely to be given the higher earning accounts or work in the big buck sales departments."

We can't believe that, 50 years (let me say that again, 50 years) after the Equal Pay Act, women are still not actually getting equal pay—or at least, we aren't getting the opportunities to actually earn it.